Question

The following code with fail in Python 3.x with TypeError: must be str, not bytes because now encode() returns bytes and print() expects only str.

#!/usr/bin/python
from __future__ import print_function
str2 = "some unicode text"
print(str2.encode('raw_unicode_escape'))

How can you print a Unicode string escaped representation using print()? I’m looking for a solution that will work with Python 2.6 or newer, including 3.x

Update

Below line will work with 3.x but it will not work with 2.6, generating AttributeError: 'file' object has no attribute 'buffer'

sys.stdout.buffer.write(str2.encode('raw_unicode_escape'))

Answer 1

I’d just use:

print(str2.encode('raw_unicode_escape').decode('ascii'))

if you want identical code in Python 3 and Python 2.6 (otherwise you could use repr in 2.6 and ascii in Python 3, but that’s not really “identical”;-).